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Robert Motherwell

Royal Scottish Academy Abstract Expressionism was a statement of values at a time when our particular concept of "civilisation" was under threat of extermination. The artist was thrown back upon himself to define his own particular code and to defend it in the living. He chose to stress personal responsibility and a heightened individuality as a counterweight to the fearful and choking conformity of the patterns that surrounded him. He worked at the nerve-ends, embracing a philosophy of risk and affirmation. Abstraction served as a language through which he could directly and dramatically express his thoughts and feelings. It permitted 'a faith in sheer possibility' even as the political trap seemed to be closing in on all sides. The works of Kline, Pollock and Motherwell all speak of an intense involvement in the act of living, of an aggressively physical pleasure. Motherwell insists on the moral basis of his work, arguing that 'aesthetic judgments derive from ethical means'. It's an attitude that almost paraphrases Lenin's dictum that 'Ethics are the Aesthetics of the future'. The progress of the work depends, therefore, on the resolution of conflicts and commitments since, as far as Motherwell is concerned, 'abstract art represents the particular acceptances and rejections of men living under the conditions of modern times.

It's interesting to compare Motherwell's argument with Kitaj's stress on the human condition, on an art 'in the image of the people'. Each age has its own face and the artist's task is to discover it. We are, of course, rooted to the fact of being human and to that we must give our love. We need to recognise the miracle of the ordinary. Abstract Art is in crisis, although this in no way impairs its potential. Tedious experimentation with minor qualifications succeeded in focusing a narrowing perception but at the expense of a loss of vision. Similarly 'decorative abstraction' has pandered to immediate satisfactions rather than deepening the range of our feelings. It's possible that even those very ethical propositions of abstract art that Motherwell advocates have now been milked or twisted by a system that has known how to incorporate them into its own series of references.

Yet, for Motherwell, abstraction remains a process of emphasis and 'emphasis vivifies life', bringing clarity to the confusion that confronts us and 'closing the void that modern man feels'. It declares the existence of a spiritual and mystical core and defines, in terms of colour and space, what lies beneath the surface of ourselves and of the world we live in.

This retrospective covers all the major aspects of Motherwell's work - the Collages, the Elegies, and the Opens. The Collages are joyous and autobiographical. They carry traces of his literary interests, his smoking habits, his travels. The NRF Series (Gallimard publishes many of Motherwell's preferred authors, Valery, Gide, Proust, Camus, etc) begins in 1959 with a piece that looks like a cross between a portrait of Susan Sontag and one of Marisol, and continues until 1973 when he finally uses up the last bit of the wrapper that had been sent him by a friend. Motherwell believes that collage is our age's substitute for the still-life, it rearranges the surface of the world to capture its inherent meaning. 'I am interested in the skin of the world,' he says, 'the sound of the world. Art can be profound when the skin is used to express a judgment of values.' It's a technique that permits Motherwell to work quickly and to feel involved in the humdrum events of his day. 'The sensation of physically operating on the world is very strong....One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again. In any case shaping and arranging such a relational structure obliterates the need, and often the awareness of representation. Without reference to likenesses, it possesses feeling because all the decisions in regard to it are ultimately made on the grounds of feeling.' Working in this way sets in motion Motherwell's love of the free-play of association. In the haphazard crossing of the pictorial planes he finds an inexhaustible surge of fresh meanings and leaves us with images that are as evocative and poetic as those of Cornell.

Motherwell's creative method barely changes whatever the nature of the particular work under hand. He uses free-association as a starting-point, beginning with a Rorschach blob, or a line or a point, or simply a piece of paper thrown at random onto the canvas. From then on the struggle is to find form, to articulate a morality moved by 'passion and tenderness'. Motherwell achieves this in his greatest series, the Elegies, 132 works in all. Here in these ovoid forms he's discovered an archetypal image that relates both to male and female sexuality and in using them to explore his own feelings he's spoken of the sensibility of our age, of that wild surge of contradictions and tensions that sound within us. There are obvious foetal and genital analogies in these forms but their staggering power comes from their ability to straddle life and death forces. Motherwell has called this series 'a funeral song for something one cared about', a work of polarities where 'black is death, anxiety; white is life, eclat'. He deals with the bare essentials, with the meshing of raw emotions, seeking 'not the thing but the effect that it produces', and he sought out a new language so that he could be precise about these feelings. It's a language that is tough and elegant, primary and revelatory. It holds to the colours of nature with their wealth of tested values, 'a blue of sky and sea; greens of trees, flowers, woods; browns of earth'. He wants the rhythms and the bones of the underlying order. It's not the appearance of reality that interests him but the revelation of its structure. At Five in the Afternoon (1949) is one of the key works in this series and from then on, as O'Hara so rightly observes, Motherwell is fighting 'an over dominant and already clarified symbolic structure from which, through the years, he will wrench with astonishing energy some of the most powerful and self-exacerbating and brutally ominous works of our time, and some of the most coldly distainful ones as well (emptying of Self).' Once again there's an ethical core to his judgment, a composite of 'integrity, sensuality, sensitivity, knowingness, passion, dedication, sincerity'. These are moral qualities that measure the substance of the man.

The Open series has occupied Motherwell since 1971 when he first set about producing a set of aquatints for Alberti's A La Pintura. He works with a reduced iconography so that the background shows up every nuance. It's a poetry of subtle distinctions where the emphasis falls on colour and format. 'Color,' he says, 'is a question of quantity, ie extension in space.' They contain references to French art, to the windows that are so much a part of the work of Bonnard, Matisse, and Picasso. Intrigued by the effect of a small picture lying against a larger one he'd been led to draw in the outline. He found himself with a kind of door-like image which he felt had overtones of closure and imprisonment, so

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Transcription Notes:
image is a photograph of Robert Motherwell page is numbered 618